Editorials
They Said It: Memorable Quotes from 2010!
Hollywood is a town built on 99% bullshit. If you’re looking for evidence, just try sifting back through the thousands upon thousands of interviews from the last year, where you’ll inevitably keep coming across the same basic quotes over and over again. Things like “He’s an absolutely brilliant director” or “The CGI is minimal” or “We were like one big happy family on set” or “The studio was very hands off during production” or – perhaps the line that best sums up 2010 – “We wouldn’t have post-converted to 3-D if we didn’t think it made sense for the film“. Nevertheless, there are always those juicy moments (a journalist’s dream) where you actually hear something authentic coming from an actor/director/producer/writer’s mouth during an interview, and to commemorate the end of another year B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen has sifted through hours and hours of quotes to recap the most memorable candid statements uttered by horror talent in 2010. Enjoy!
“Two months of work on the copy at a lab and they came to us and said they weren’t sure if they could print some of the stuff in the film and they had to call the police and consult lawyers. We asked why and they said that some of the content was questionable. The cops talked to us…like some of the scenes in the movie were real, like it was a snuff film. It’s ridiculous; what kind of maniac would bring a snuff film to be printed on 35mm?” – A Serbian Film screenwriter Aleksandar Radivojevic, talking about the German lab that refused to print portions of the film
“The studio got cold feet when we couldn’t cast A-List talent quickly over the course of the summer of 2009. They liked the script which I wrote with Guillermo del Toro and they couldn’t see why Hollywood’s top actresses weren’t signing up. They decided it was me.” – Director Larry Fessenden on why he’s no longer directing The Orphanage remake
“Normally you’d have to go to the studio and then have to get their head casting people through. Then you need to [go to] all the junior executives to approve. Then the co-president, who has to go to the chairman. It’s just fucking amazing how many assholes it takes to get a single decision made.” – Skyline co-director Colin Strause on why they chose to make the film independently
“At first I was very skeptical. But they asked me to just look at what was being done, and I visited the post-production house…that ended up doing it. And interestingly enough they had done ‘Clash of the Titans’, which I’d read a lot about how bad it was. And I saw it there in their projection room and it looked really quite fantastic.” – Director Wes Craven on his reaction to the studio wanting to do a 3-D post-conversion on My Soul to Take
“I refrain from…defending my movie. So if you think that the movie is, for example, misogynistic, good for you. You feel it is pro-male? Pro-female?…I would never stand to defend it. Let other people defend it.” – Original I Spit on Your Grave director Meir Zarchi on the film’s controversial nature
“It’s funny, because when you start to make a film people say, ‘Why is your film different? We’re not gonna give you money unless you tell us why it’s different.’ So you make something different, and at the end of making the film they say, ‘Oh my god, what have you done? You’ve made something different. How can we sell this?’” – Monsters director Gareth Edwards
“There are a lot of jump scares in this, which some people may not like…But tough shit.” – John Carpenter, talking about his latest film The Ward
“Wait a second, guys! I don’t like this framing, man. This is like…this is neither this nor that. Cut! I don’t like this lens…you said he was gonna be a cowboy!” – Michael Biehn, overheard while directing The Victim
“The only real hard part that I was not looking forward to was when I had to pretend I was eating Aki’s poo. That was maybe the grossest thing that I could just NOT deal with!” – Ashley C. Williams, the “middle piece” in The Human Centipede
“‘Part 2’ will be ‘My Little Pony’ compared to ‘Part 1’.” – The Human Centipede director Tom Six on the sequel
“When you really get into 3D, you find out guys who love 3D, they HATE that ‘Comin’ at ya’ bullshit. The crap where they make shit come at you, it’s gimmicky and it’s bad 3D.” – Dark Country director Thomas Jane
“I think it was wise to convert our film into 3D. The studio and [director] Louis [Leterrier] set the bar high for the tests. If it wasn’t going to look great they weren’t going to pull the trigger. In many ways, I think it’s perfect for a movie like ‘Clash’.” – Clash of the Titans screenwriter Phil Hay
“What really made a lasting impression on me was that I could go around the corner from one of our 42nd Street cinemas in New York City’s Times Square and receive fellatio from Gladys, who was known as the foremost transsexual hooker on the grindhouse circuit. Around 1970, it only cost $15.00 for a 42nd Street hooker to come back to my home.” – Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, remembering the 42nd Street cinema scene in the 1970s
“You never earn a platinum card in this business. You have to always convince people and do the pitches and all of that, and I’m no good at that.” – Director George A. Romero on still having to prove himself after all these years
“Every day we’d shoot all day and, at midnight, David would have to get on the phone and defend shooting the next day’s work.” – Sigourney Weaver, reflecting on David Fincher’s clashes with the studio while filming Alien 3
“I never intended [for] it to be a cult film. I wanted to make a serious movie.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen
“With a very little amount of money, for little resources, I think we’ve gone very far with those eagles and vultures. I can say that from a distance, those eagles and vultures look pretty shocking and terrifying, but realistic. It looks like it was done Hollywood-style from a distance. But when you do that movie close-up, you know, that Hollywood movie close-up or even an indie movie close-up, hey, it’s something unique, it’s something different. It’s something you’ve never seen before. Hey, maybe it’s art.” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on the film’s special effects
“Whitney’s gifted, in many ways. But especially in the acting part of it. When I saw her, she did one or two takes, [and] I say, ‘Whitney’s it. She’s it.’” – Birdemic director James Nguyen on casting lead actress Whitney Moore
“He came and slept with us and we thought we had gotten past that years ago. He said that he had a few nightmares,” said Dolph Rau, an upset father. “gain, all that I would like to see come out of this is that it’s not going to happen again.” – Massachusetts father Dolph Rau about the trauma suffered by his young son after Saw 3-D was accidentally played in place of Megamind
“No matter what you do, somebody is going to come after you. You say ‘The Thing Begins’ and they go, ‘John Carpenter’s is the beginning, asshole. Yours is like ‘The Thing Bullshit’. Why don’t you call it that?’” – Producer Marc Abraham on possible fanboy reactions to a new title for The Thing prequel
“When we first cooked up ‘Saw’ we actually had three ideas…One of them was an idea about two guys stuck in a room, and there’s a dead body lying on the floor…so that eventually became ‘Saw’. A second idea I had was about a guy who goes to bed at night, and wakes up in the morning to find that he has all these scratch marks on his body. And he doesn’t know what happened, and he starts to realize something’s happening to him at night when he sleeps. So he starts setting up all these cameras at night to film himself when he sleeps. Guess what movie that became?” – Director James Wan on how he thought of ‘Paranormal Activity’ before Oren Peli did
“They were very excited about the idea of doing a zombie show until I handed them a zombie script where zombies were actually doing zombie shit…It’s one of those things where the network says, ‘Oh yeah, we want to stretch the envelope’ until they realize that they’re actually looking at a stretched envelope and they go, ‘Woah, no, let’s do ‘CSI’ some more.’” – The Walking Dead director/producer Frank Darabont, talking about when the show was originally being developed at NBC
“Yeah, well I read the script and they said that…when I read it my eye was going to be shot out and I remember on a movie called ‘Season of the Witch’ I wanted them to shoot my eye out with an arrow. And the producers didn’t go for that, so when it was handed to me in this movie that they were going to shoot my eye out with a gun I thought, ‘yeah, I’m going to make that movie.” – Nicolas Cage, on one of his reasons for taking the role in Drive Angry 3-D
“For some reason Robert [Rodriguez] always gives me these sharp objects. I was Navajas in ‘Desperado’, I was Razor Charlie in ‘From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’, I was Cuchillo in this. And then I was Machete.” – Actor Danny Trejo on the set of Predators
“You can see a mark here that has healed up, I hit the steady-cam and I was bleeding. My face was bleeding and I didn’t want to stop, we continued because I had blood all over so we kept filming. It was a really great moment. When I get this moment, ugly motherfucker with a Predator, honestly I would probably choke him in real life. Because I could reach for his neck and it would be over. Predator or human it doesn’t matter.” – Russian actor Oleg Taktarov on the set of Predators
“I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for the horror fans…You know, I fought being a ‘genre’ actress for so many years…and then I kinda went, ‘You know, I actually know this really well, and I really like it’. And the fans are kinda my family, and it’s such a tight-knit community. And I don’t need to be on a TV show. You know, I don’t desire to be on the cover of ‘US Weekly’. I’m here to do a good job, and to work.” – Actress Danielle Harris on being a scream queen
“I don’t want to insult anybody, but I’ve been watching these westerns recently and they don’t have any cojones anymore…[‘Jonah Hex’ is] going to bring back sort of this hybrid of the spaghetti western genre, you know the balls of westerns.” – Josh Brolin on the set of critically-panned summer flop Jonah Hex
“You wanna go see fairy vampire movies and pretty boys, fine – there’s an audience for it…It’s not what I wanna do. I like my vamps snarly and mean…and fucking ugly.” – Stake Land writer/actor Nick Damici, commenting on the Twilight phenomenon
“I look at the old movies and I think the dream sequences aren’t that interesting…I think they feel like bad Broadway musicals or something, like with steam and smoke and they’re not scary, they’re not beautiful, they’re not interesting. I’ve looked at everything from German expressionistic film to Tim Burton movies to all kinds of disparate influences and the one thing this movie is going to have [is] a vision when it comes to the dream sequences. And I think they’re beautiful and macabre and scary.” – Director Samuel Bayer, on why the dream sequences in his Nightmare on Elm Street remake will be better than those in the original series
“One man’s magic is another man’s gluey torture session.” – “New Freddy” Jackie Earle Haley on the arduous makeup process
“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.” – James Cameron, commenting on the post-converted 3-D in Piranha
“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own. It is amazing that in the movie-making process – which is certainly a team sport – that Cameron consistently celebrates himself out as though he is a team of one. His comments are ridiculous, self-serving and insulting to those of us who are not caught up in serving his ego and his rhetoric.” – Piranha 3-D producer Mark Canton, responding to James Cameron’s comments
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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